Alistair Varley was an executive at General Electric Co. managing a $700-million portfolio of international projects when he had his aha moment. An engineer who worked for him was complaining that he and his wife were often too busy to cook for their two children but were tired of eating the same takeout over and over again.

“He was like, ‘You know what? I just don’t want to order pizza again. I want to order from a really good restaurant and I’d really like to get on my phone and do that and for my food to turn up 20 minutes after I walk in the door,’” said Varley, founder of food-delivery service Munch, which launched in Peterborough, Ont., last fall.

It seemed like such an obvious idea that Varley, who describes himself as an entrepreneur at heart, began to explore it. Sure, there were other food-delivery options, but Varley thought they siphoned too much money away from restaurants and usually weren’t available outside of big cities.

So Varley, still working at GE, put some of his own money toward researching the best business model and getting an app developed. He still hadn’t decided whether he wanted to leave his job and commit to the idea full time when GE asked him to move to the U.S. as part of a global restructuring. He took that as a sign and quit in April 2015.

“I thought it was a great opportunity for me to step out of GE at that stage and give the business 100 per cent of my time,” he said.

That doesn’t mean it was an easy decision.

“Throughout my childhood my parents pushed me to go to university and get an engineering degree and get a good job and a solid pension and all this stuff,” said Varley, who was born in the U.K. and emigrated to Canada about 20 years ago. “Breaking that social programming probably took me about 10 years.”

Varley said he put “a lot” of his own money toward getting Munch off the ground, which made the decision to quit GE even more nerve-wracking, but he’s convinced that he has found a “win-win-win” business model that will make his food-delivery app more popular than existing services such as UberEats and Foodora.

Currently, Munch is only available in small municipalities in southern Ontario, including Peterborough, Markham and the Durham region, where there is little competition from other delivery services. “We chose Peterborough as a test market because it’s got very different demographics and a university and it’s kind of isolated,” Varley said.

This isolation allowed Munch to work with restaurants to tailor the app to their needs and discover how best to attract customers before it moves into bigger markets.

Munch’s business model is simple. Much like other food-delivery services, customers order from participating restaurants using the app, which is available on Apple and Android devices. Drivers, hired by Munch, will pick up the order and deliver it to the customer, and the customer will be asked to give the driver a rating out of five stars.

The difference between Munch and its competitors, Varley said, is in how it works with its partners. Whereas Foodora and UberEats take a cut of the restaurant’s revenue from the order, Munch adds a 10 per cent fee on top of the order price, meaning there is no cost to the restaurant. It also doesn’t charge restaurants annual fees to participate, as do some other food-delivery apps.

The way that we’re positioning it is, ‘Look, it’s going to happen, so you can either go with the big guy that’s siphoning 30 per cent of the profit out of your business or you can go with us’

Munch also adds a $4.99 delivery fee, 90 per cent of which goes to the driver. (Drivers for UberEats and Foodora are paid based on the distance travelled plus a delivery fee.)

“Food delivery apps are inevitable, there are a lot of big players coming into the game,” Varley said. “The way that we’re positioning it is, ‘Look, it’s going to happen, so you can either go with the big guy that’s siphoning 30 per cent of the profit out of your business or you can go with us.’”

Steve Stewart, owner of the BrickHouse Craft Burger Grill in Peterborough, said he tried to offer delivery in the downtown core at lunchtime on weekdays but found it too difficult to manage. “Munch assumes all the liability and hires the drivers and goes through all that stuff that normally is quite frustrating for any restaurant that’s doing delivery,” he said. “They take away a lot of the risk, which makes their app kind of a no-brainer for us.”

Although it’s early days — Varley said Munch’s revenue is in the “thousands” and he doesn’t expect to turn a profit for a couple more years — the app is seeing double-digit growth in customers every week.

Varley has raised $500,000 from angel investors and said Munch is about eight months away from scaling up to more markets and bigger cities. Oakville, a city west of Toronto, is next on the list. Eventually, Varley said he plans to expand across Canada and into the United States.

He also sees opportunities beyond restaurants. A local supermarket in Peterborough has talked to Munch about offering grocery delivery, and the company is also looking at working with the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.

“We’re looking for geographies where people are busy, they have disposable income to spend on an app like this and they want that convenience,” Varley said.

“We believe that those types of people are willing to pay $4.99 for delivery and they’re willing to support their local restaurants by using a local platform that’s run by a local entrepreneur.”

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